Tabulator is Alive!

[aklaver]

I realize this is a question, but it did not seem appropriate for Stack Overflow. Development seems to have stalled out four months ago and there have been no issues closed since 05/26-/2025. Are there plans to keep the project moving forward?

[lubiah]

Yeah, I also want to know. @olifolkerd, any help?

[keithxm23]

+1 to this question. If this project is no longer maintained, it would be good to know so that I could start investigating other options.

[AndrewHutcheson]

@olifolkerd I also would like to know!

[arty-name]

Maybe @azmy60 or @rathboma could shed some light on this topic?

[rathboma]

I've asked Azmi to try and spend a few hours a week working on triaging and reviewing bug fixes. Beekeeper honestly doesn't gain much directly from this work, but we want tabluator to live on! I am running Beekeeper alongside a full time job, so I'm already stretched thin.

The broader project and roadmap are really up to @olifolkerd , this is his project really.

Like the rest of you, I'd love to figure out a way to make tabulator more maintained and stable!

[arty-name]

Thank you for the quick answer, @rathboma!

The lack of time is understandable, and I am sure no one wants to put pressure on maintainers.

Do you think it would help other people to have more clarity right away if you marked this issue as pinned?

[rathboma]

We've pinned it. I'm going to try and connect with Oli and figure out plans for 2026. Stay tuned!

[olifolkerd]

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for nudging me on this and sorry for the lack of communication over the last year (crikey can't believe it has been that long)!

First off, apologies for the lack of updates over the last year, I've had a lot going on and decided to step back for a few months to focus on other aspects of my life, that rather unexpectedly turned into a whole year! which I didn't realise till I had a look at the last release date just now!

Over the almost 10 years that Tabulator has existed I recently worked out that I have spent over 7000 (voluntary unpaid) hours building out this tool largely by myself, with the occasional bit of small community support. Aside from the the more recent sizeable contributions of @rathboma and @azmy60 over the last couple of years, which have been transformative and amazing, Thanks Guys! (and to everyone that has contributed, And a massive shoutout to the community managers on Discord too).

Maintaining a popular library is time consuming and hard work, and comes with a lot of pressure from the ever expanding userbase, sometimes with very unrealistic demands on a persons time and attention, and carrying that burden by myself takes its tole over time.

Building Tabulator has been a labour of love for me, and something I am deeply passionate about, and I certainly see Tabulator having a long life going forward. But as my personal and work life's have evolved, I have taken on more responsibilities outside of this project, I don't have as much time available as I used to, and while I'm certainly up for picking things up again, I certainly wont be able to be churning out major feature releases every couple of months like the old days.

I know that @rathboma and @azmy60 and the Beekeeper Studio team have been keeping things going while I've been off, so in the first instance I'm going to have a catch up with them in the next couple of weeks to see what we can do to get a release version out with all of the amazing updates they have made to the platform. And then I can begin easing myself slowly back into things.

In the near term I will have a chat with the Beekeeper Studio team to see if we can come up with a more sustainable way to share the load and maintain the library in the long term, and start having a look through the current state of things to see what the next release looks like and take things from there.

But going forward in all honesty, this project needs broader community support with some of the now 7000 star-ers of this project looking to help with some of the features and bug fixes. I'm eager to engage with the community to look at how we could bring in more people to help with Tabulator, and if we have more contributors I'm very happy to work through the PR's!

If the community is willing to engage then I'm very happy to collaborate! Together we can work out a new release cadence and team structure to keep bringing Tabulator to the world.

Thanks very much everyone, and sorry for disappearing for so long.

Happy Tabulating!

Oli :)

[lubiah]

Hello @olifolkerd, How about turning tabulator into an org with members?

[dbauszus-glx]

@olifolkerd I totally understand the pressure of maintaining a project as complex as tabulator and would like to help in the future.

It would be great if tabulator could be under the stewardship of an organisation allowing more people to contribute through PRs and help with the triage of open tickets.

Did you have a look at project incubators such as the OpenJS foundation? https://openjsf.org/projects

Another option to invite contributors could be through the Google Summer of Code. Applications are now open until the beginning of February. https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

[BaptisteCrouzet]

I would like to help, if anything move, you can ping me or message me on the Discord server 🙂